The Mad Music of Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane

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Thank you, Kevin Barry, for reminding us that the people in the book business are not all idiots simply because they remain locked in slavish pursuit of The Next Hot Young Thing. Your first novel, City of Bohane, is proof that every once in a long while the slavish pursuit leads to the discovery of a genuine gem, a new writer like you who pops onto the scene fully formed, spewing poison and wit, able to use the English language as a weapon and a tool and a toy. There’s music and magic in your prose.

The fictional city of the novel’s title is located in the West of Ireland. It’s the middle of the 21st century and this wind-battered burgh, pierced by a foul black river and surrounded by a boggy wilderness known as the Big Nothin’, is brewing with bad portents. Logan Hartnett, aka the Albino, aka the Long Fella, is the fearsome kingpin of the reigning gang known as the Hartnett Fancy, but he’s been hearing whispers. An old rival, the Gant Broderick, is said to be coming back to town after a 25-year absence, his intentions unknown but presumed to be less than benign. Worse, the residents of the cliff-top slums known as the Northside Rises, are chafing under the Fancy’s rule, itching for a change of administration. Worst of all, Logan’s wife Macu (for Immaculata) was the Gant’s former lover, and now she’s thinking about abandoning Logan, maybe going straight, maybe going back to the Gant. What’s a ganglord to do?

Don’t let the nifty set-up mislead you into thinking this is yet another mechanical piece of plot-driven fiction. Though there’s plenty of action — and more than a little of the old Ultra Violence — the real star here is Barry’s language, the music of it. Every page sings with evocative dialog, deft character sketches, impossibly perfect descriptions of the physical world. Kevin Barry is, of course, Irish to his bones.

Here, for instance, is how a pot-stirrer from the Northside Rises name of Eyes Cusack got his handle: “Eyes was named so for good reason. He saw the city through tiny smoking holes set deep in a broad, porridgy face.” Girly, Logan’s irrepressible 90-year-old Ma, has spent the past the past 30 years “buzzing on off-script tablets, hard liquor and Hedy Lamarr pictures.” The Gant Broderick has “a pair of hands on him the size of Belfast sinks,” and he came up rough-like: “His father was a no-good Nothin’ quaffer. His father was half his life nose-deep in a bowl of Wrassler stout and sentimental as a sackful of ballads.” Here’s what a certain fishmonger does inside a shotbar: “He shlepped back a couple of mulekickers and tried to paw the plastik bazookas off the Ukrainer barkeep.” Typical lout.

The city of Bohane is itself a character, as well as a molder of character. Here’s a warren of vice on the southside: “Smoketown was hoors, herb, fetish parlours, grog pits, needle alleys, dream salons and Chinese restaurants…All crowded in on each other in the lean-to streets. The tottering old chimneys were stacked in great deranged happiness against the morning sky.” And here’s the malevolent river: “…it is a black and swift-moving rush at the base of almost every street, as black as the bog waters that feed it, and a couple of miles downstream the river rounds the last of the bluffs and there enters the murmurous ocean. The ocean is not directly seen from the city, but at all times there is the ozone rumour of its proximity, a rasp on the air, like a hoarseness. It is all of it as bleak as only the West of Ireland can be.”

Clothing is important to Barry as a revealer of character. Here’s what a sociopathic killer named Fucker Burke wore:

Silver high-top boots, drainpipe strides in a natty-boy mottle, a low-slung dirk belt and a three-quarter jacket of saffron-dyed sheepskin. He was tall and straggly as an invasive weed. He was astonishingly sentimental, and as violent again. His belligerent green eyes were strange flowers indeed. He was seventeen years of age and he read magical significance into occurrences of the number nine. He had ambition inside but could hardly even name it. His true love: an unpredictable Alsatian bitch name of Angelina.

And here’s what Fucker’s homicidal sidekick Wolfie Stanners wore:

Black patent high-tops, tight bleached denims with a matcher of a waistcoat, a high dirk belt, and a navy Crombie with a black velvet collar. Wolfie was low-sized, compact, ginger, and he thrummed with dense energies. He had a blackbird’s poppy-eyed stare, thyroidal, and if his brow was no more than an inch deep, it was packed with an alley rat’s cunning. He was seventeen, also, and betrayed, sometimes, by odd sentiments under moonlight. He wanted to own entirely the city of Bohane.

But it’s not to be his. For all its testosterone, the novel is orchestrated by three quietly powerful and cunning women — Girly, Macu, and charismatic Jenni Ching, a girl of old Smoketown stock, proprietress of the Ho Pee Ching Oh-Kay Koffee Shoppe, who rises above the violent flailings of the men and brings together her own fighting force of “a half-dozen wilding girls.” They’re the future of the city of Bohane, a place much like the world we live in today, where tribes will forever rise while other tribes fall, where violence is bred into the wind and the water, and where all any person can hope for is enough style and guile to survive.

Thank you for all of this, Kevin Barry. Please keep the mad music coming.

Bill Morris
is a staff writer for The Millions. He is the author of the novels Motor City Burning, All Souls’ Day, and Motor City, and the nonfiction book American Berserk. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Granta, The New York Times, The (London) Independent, L.A. Weekly, Popular Mechanics, and The Daily Beast. He lives in New York City.

A few years ago, at a publishing conclave in Manhattan, someone handed me a slim unlovely galley called The Riddle of Life and Death. It consisted of a pair of novellas: Leo Tolstoy'sThe Death of Ivan Ilyichand Tell Me A Riddle, by Tillie Olsen. I'm always in the market for Tolstoy -- even Tolstoy I already own. But who, I wondered, was this Tillie Olsen? And aside from a certain anagrammatic plausibility, what had she done to deserve the unenviable role of Count Leo's undercard, the "Under Assistant West Coast Promo Man" to his "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction?" Before I could be bothered to find out, a move to a new apartment landed the book in a giveaway box on the stoop.
Well, praise be to the gods of books on stoops, who apparently make allowances for callowness. Walking through my neighborhood one day last December, I stumbled across a hideous Delta Trade Paperback of Tell Me A Riddle. If the Gift-like circularity hadn't caught my attention (give an Olsen, get an Olsen) the promise of an introduction from John Leonard would have:
See how it's done: First what Cynthia Ozick once called "a certain corona of moral purpose." And then the prose that lashes like a whip, that cracks and stings. And then the judgment coming down like a terrible swift sword. And then a forgiving grace note, like haiku or pascal. memory, history, poetry, and prophecy converge. Reading her again, and again, and again, I find that when you love a book, it loves you back.
Jesus, does it ever. I actually postponed reading Leonard's introduction until I'd finished the book, but by the second page of the first piece, "I Stand Here Ironing," I, too, was feeling the love: palpable, unflinching, almost parental. By the twelfth and last page, I was in tears. "I Stand Here Ironing" is a story about a working mother, but to call it that -- even to call it the best story ever written about a working mother -- feels reductive. Work-life balance may now be the stuff of Atlantic cover stories and Lean In, but in 1961, exploring it in fiction was a downright radical act.
The middle two of these four stories more obviously connect to Olsen's reputation as a feminist and Paleyesque working-class heroine. But the political virtues that helped to land them in anthologies and on syllabi in the '60s and '70s may also have contributed to Olsen's relative obscurity among readers of my generation, for whom the canon wars are settled history. (The fact that she never published another collection of fiction after Tell Me A Riddle can't have helped. Nor, come to think of it, can the spectaculardisservice book-cover designers have done to it.) Oddly, then, the partial eclipse of her politics might be a good and a timely thing: it gives us room to see her art.
The novella that concludes Tell Me A Riddle tells the story of a long marriage, and is one of the great pieces of writing about death. As the wife grows sick, the couple haul themselves around the country, visiting their far-flung progeny. And in the nearness of its approach to their worries, it approaches poetry:
In the airplane, cunningly designed to encase from motion (no wind, no feel of flight), she had sat severely and still, her face turned to the sky through which they cleaved and left no scar.
So this was how it looked, the determining, the crucial sky, and this was how man moved through it, remote above the dwindled earth, the concealed human life. Vulnerable life, that could scar.
There was a steerage ship of memory that shook across a great, circular sea: clustered, ill human beings; and through the thick-stained air, tiny fretting waters in a window round like the airplane's -- sun round, moon round. (The round thatched roofs of Olshana.) Eye round -- like the smaller window that framed distance the solitary year of exile when only her eyes could travel, and no voice spoke. And the polar winds hurled themselves across snows trackless and endless and white - like the clouds which had closed together below and hidden the earth.
"Tiny fretting waters..." "Clustered, ill human beings..." "Vulnerable life, that could scar..." I've been carrying these lines around with me for months now, waiting for a chance to share them. Normally, the fact that someone beat me to the punch here at The Millions would be a source of regret, but I'm happy to find myself in Alice Mattison's amen corner. Tell Me a Riddle really does deserve a place next to Ivan Ilyich, it turns out -- not because Tillie Olsen's a progressive and a humanist (though more power to her), but because she's a master, and this story, this book, is her masterpiece.

I like listening to people talk about video games. Not those conversations about who scored a sick no-scope head shot, or which character's passive ability allows them to farm the most efficiently, mind you, but about why video games can be meaningful and why they matter.

This book is so great, and is totally unlike anything I’ve ever read. I met Kevin Barry at an event last year and he was super nice too – he wears this little pork pie writers hat, like, non-ironically. At that point, they were referring to his work as ‘James Joyce meets Sin City’ which does seem to fit, doesn’t it?

I usually hate it when people say a book (or a movie or a TV show) is “X meets Y,” like “It’s ‘Robinson Crusoe’ meets ‘What To Expect When You’re Expecting'”, or whatever. But I must admit that likening “City of Bohane” to “James Joyce meets ‘Sin City'” has more than a small grain of truth to it. And I was glad to learn that Kevin Barry doesn’t wear that porkpie hat ironically.

This book has been such a massive disappointment! I started out with all the goodwill in the world but the overkill of Slang knocked the reading-zest right out of me. The characters don’t appreciably advance beyond the shape of cut-out stereotypes and some of the… well, sad to type, sexism… induced cringing. There are of course various dashes of verbal brilliance but the slanginess bogs the whole enterprise down, y’sketch me? And there is… this is difficult to explain… a certain comical slap stickiness about the entire narrative that made me simply not care. I felt reminded of British caper movies, which work well on the screen but crumble on page. My recommendation is to read 10pages or so before buying it; advice I wish I would’ve been given.

If you want a guide to how we’ve come to find ourselves in such a bewildering, dangerous place -- and to how we might, in the future, avoid such empty hucksters -- choose Elmer Gantry. It’s one of Sinclair Lewis’s best. And it’s the story of Donald Trump.

Today’s media machine is so consumed with Lindsay Lohan’s latest perp walk and whether Ashton really did cheat on Demi that the general moviegoing public is as functionally illiterate about the day-to-day workings of the film business as it is about the financial industry. Some day Michael Lewis may turn his sardonic eye from the business of sports to the business of Hollywood make-believe, but until then, those of us who want a smart, well-reported peek behind the camera will have to return to Julie Salamon’sThe Devil’s Candy, her classic behind-the-scenes tale of the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities, published 20 years ago next month.
The magic of The Devil’s Candy is that it wasn’t conceived or written as a hit piece. The book is subtitled “The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco,” but when Salamon, then a film critic for the Wall Street Journal, began following Brian De Palma around the Bonfire set, he was riding high on the success of Scarface and The Untouchables, and he saw Bonfire as a prestige project that could boost him into the first rank of Hollywood auteurs. It didn’t turn out that way, but no one -- not the studio executives, the stars, the film crew, nor De Palma and Salamon herself -- knew just how disastrous a flop the film would be until it opened in the winter of 1990.
As much as The Devil’s Candy benefits from the reader’s foreknowledge that the film everyone in the book is struggling to get made will turn out to be a notorious turkey, the true value of the book lies in Salamon’s reporting. She is blessed with that rare talent for not missing the forest for the trees while, at the same time, being able to see the trees. She places the production, a big-budget adaptation of Tom Wolfe’sThe Bonfire of the Vanities, a bestselling novel about the fiscal excesses of the 1980s, squarely in the age of Hollywood excess. The Studio System, with its tight budgets and cookie-cutter approach to filmmaking, was long gone, replaced by high-stakes, risk-hungry corporate culture designed to chase blockbuster hits like Jaws and Star Wars. Unlike the founding generation of immigrants who built Hollywood, she writes, the crop of executives then heading the major studios were “refugees not from Russia but from Wall Street."
They were the young M.B.A.’s and lawyers who had come of age during the eighties, men and women who had never built or run a company, but who thought nothing of buying and selling them -- before they were thirty… It didn’t matter whether [their companies] made food or furniture, or if the food or the furniture was any good. The companies were merely components. The thing that mattered was the deal.
Gifted financial reporter that she is, Salamon walks the reader through how this deal-centric mentality led studio executives not only to lavish multi-million dollar salaries on the movie’s director and stars, but also to squander many more millions satisfying De Palma’s every artistic whim. In one gripping sequence, De Palma’s second-unit director Eric Schwab spends hundreds of thousands of dollars choreographing a shot of the Concorde landing at JFK against a background of the sun setting over the New York skyline -- a shot that, while breathtaking, lasts all of a few seconds in the final version of the film.
At the same time, Salamon allows all the book’s characters, from the most egomaniacal stars to the lowliest production assistant, to shine with real humanity. For me, the most poignant figure in the book is Melanie Griffith, who is cast as the blonde bimbo mistress of Sherman McCoy, a wealthy bond trader played by Tom Hanks. Hanks comes off as a talented, hard-working young actor skillfully climbing the ladder to stardom, but Griffith, who was 33 and coming off her second pregnancy, was already on the downslope of her career. The film’s creative team holds meetings to discuss what to do about the age lines on her face (“Use Preparation H,” one producer says. “That’ll shrink ’em.”) and everybody on the set feels free to discuss whether she is too fat to be believable as a rich bond trader’s mistress. Griffith throws diva-like hissy fits about the size of her trailer and the crowds of onlookers on the set during her scenes, but for once, in Salamon’s telling, one understands Griffith’s neurotic rage, and even sympathizes with her.
This keen insight into the artistic personality, more so than her reportorial skill, is on display in Wendy and the Lost Boys, Salamon’s new biography of playwright Wendy Wasserstein, published in August. As the title implies, Salamon appears to have intended to use Wasserstein’s life story as a springboard for a group portrait of New York’s off-Broadway theater scene in the 1970s and 80s. Wasserstein, best known for her plays Uncommon Women and Others and The Heidi Chronicles, knew everyone who was anyone in New York theater and seemed to have a singular talent for falling hopelessly in love with the dreamy, driven gay men who made the theater world of that era tick.
The book is very well done, and if you are a Wasserstein fan, Wendy and the Lost Boys is a must-read, but it pales in comparison to The Devil’s Candy. In part, this is because Wasserstein, who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Heidi Chronicles, is just not an important or interesting enough writer to merit the attention Salamon lavishes on her. At the same time, any effort on Salamon’s part to use Wasserstein’s career as a window to the broader theater scene is eclipsed by the sheer complexity of Wasserstein’s private life.
Wasserstein, the youngest daughter of a wealthy, hyper-successful Brooklyn Jewish family (her brother was billionaire investment banker Bruce Wasserstein), had a succession of tortured love affairs with gay men and finally a daughter, via artificial insemination, at age 48. In 2006, just seven years later, she died of lymphoma. The levels of secret-keeping and duplicity this life required is worthy of an Elizabethan drama, but ultimately Wasserstein comes off less poignant and plucky than self-deluded and bullheaded. In this telling, Wasserstein is a woman who simply refused to give up in the face of insurmountable odds, whether those odds were that the gay man she was in love with would return her affections or that the cancer she was hiding from the world would simply go away. This can be charming in characters of romantic comedies for whom all turns out well in the end, but for a real person, who leaves her daughter motherless and alone, it can get a trifle infuriating.
None of this is Salamon’s fault, of course, but books on the entertainment industry work best as guilty pleasures, and while the pleasures of Wendy and the Lost Boys are many, for sheer guiltiness, nothing can touch the pleasures of The Devil’s Candy.